


The Way Things Are, Sometimes

by cualacino



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Infidelity, Post-Canon, safe sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:06:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1702553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cualacino/pseuds/cualacino
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She likes being friendly with, being friends with Mark Cohen. She likes Mark Cohen. And she is pragmatic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way Things Are, Sometimes

She pays for coffee when they have it, and Mark likes to laugh and say he’s being progressive. It makes her laugh too, all through winter and into early April. They start to go out for lunch then, when exhaust doesn’t scatter in the thin, cold air, when the city warms around them. She likes to go to galleries with him, listening to the low, ironic murmur of his voice as he says in his best Westport drawl, “But it’s so _obviously_ post-modern, isn’t it?” She likes idle people-watching on the subway with him drumming his heels on the tacky floor. Mark took her to a house party once: they smoked pot and played Gin rummy upstairs while twenty bohemians spooned on the ground floor, and she liked that well enough.

Joanne likes the preciseness and stability of his distance -- she likes his stability in general. She likes being friendly with, being friends with Mark Cohen. She likes Mark Cohen. And she is pragmatic, and as Maureen bustles out the door of the loft, pink and embarrassed and self-righteous, those two things have come together in a way Joanne did not expect in the empty lot and performance-space-to-be in December.

So, she arrives at Mark’s apartment sometime past eight, passing the lot as she goes. New York swelters in June with the huffing, steaming asphalt underfoot and blackening, settling brick. With each floor, the heat stacks up, softly blinding heat that catches the whine of mosquitoes and fluorescent lights. Her skin is damp, blood thumping just beneath, and the railings are hot and damp under her palms as she climbs. 

Joanne pushes the rattling front door open, and papers and some bits of trash rush towards her, sticking briefly to her ankles before scuttling past, outside and down the hall. At Mark’s, there’s an industrial floor fan, thirty inches across, that he strings up in a corner of the ceiling each summer as soon as the spring coolness breaks. It pours hot, stale air over the front room.

In the apartment, the darkness thickens and becomes a musty, opaque haze. There are jagged white shapes of light coming in from the windows, and they stretch over the array on the floor in front of the touch-worn couch: there is a coffee table, a splintering plastic chair, and some half-broken wood piled around the garbage can.

A pair of legs -- undoubtedly Mark’s, by their thinness -- bend over the arm of the couch at the knee; when she walks around, she thinks he’s asleep. His eyes are lidded and blued by thin veins, and when she moves towards him, they flicker open one at a time and blink slowly. A corded phone is on his chest with the receiver in his limp, curled hand. 

He tries twice, voice cut with exhaustion, “Joanne?”

“Hi, Mark.” She finds a place on the middle cushion. “Sorry to wake you up.”

“I wasn’t --” Mark smiles dimly, pulling his legs in. “I wasn’t sleeping. ‘Supposed to be making phone calls, but.” He sits up, letting the phone’s body and receiver and cord fall into his lap, and for a moment he’s mildly vulnerable, curled up with his feet pointed in. He rubs his eyes deeply with the tips of his fingers, then the heels of his palms, and sets the phone down on the floor roughly.

He kicks off the couch awkwardly, stumbling over the coffee table and some books on his way to one of the power strips without noticing. Joanne watches him, his dull eyes and heat-heavy movements. “You okay?”

A desk lamp, bent over the floor, flickers on unsurely. Mark fiddles with its shining neck briefly and stands. “Why?”

“To be honest, you look pretty awful.” 

He doesn’t look at her, patting down his collar and pockets for something. “Sorry for the mess. I’ve been…” He turns. “Are my glasses over there?”

They are, and she hands them over. “Are you okay?”

“Haven’t been sleeping well. Haven’t been sleeping at all -- thanks.” He knocks his foot against the table unfeelingly and takes the glasses, fits them one side at a time over his ears. “Haven’t been eating well either, really.” He rubs his face hard with his palms, pushing up the frames to smear the skin. “It’s fine, I’m just too _employed_.”

“You’ve got to take care of yourself,” she says, and maybe Mark hears some early insincerity in her voice. He laughs a little tiredly and lets his hands drop to his neck.

“Why’re you here, Joanne?”

“Well, you know.” She takes a breath and dips her fingers into the corners of her eyes to dry them. “I know, it’s been rough with her and me -- it’s always something with us, right? But it’s wearing, Mark. You know what I mean, that you put your heart and soul and mind and body into it, and maybe then she puts in whatever she wants. I feel like I’m settling, settling for her, settling into some little rut that I’m going to stay in for the rest of my life. I know it’ll get to a point where I can’t leave, and I think of us, down the road, and me, completely -- stuck.”

She hears and feels the catch in her throat, and she looks hard at Mark to steady herself. “It’s not fair to you for me to up-end all this. But I’ve tried to end it, I’ve tried, and then she’s there, and she’s just begging me, and she’s not sorry, and I think she’s sorry and.” She flails for words, breathing slowly. “And I’m at a goddamn loss.”

Joanne turns to him in full. He seems attentive, looking at her, and he’s been nodding at intervals, but his eyes are red-rimmed and stroked with dark, weary circles, slightly sunken. He is barely present, but putting up a good front. She shifts a hand across the cushions, almost towards him. “Really, Mark, are you okay?” 

He shrugs one shoulder, then the other, and she turns back to the apartment. It is just short of gutted: insulation tarp peeling back from the windows, corners of posters left on the walls, some shreds of paper and maybe bits of plaster on the floor. It was always a jumble, a sudden collision of Mark and Roger’s different brands of scraping by, but it looked occupied, natural. The mess is mostly gone but it’s not clean, and the clutter at least gave it a lived-in feeling, a homey feeling. Most of the old furniture is missing, too, moved to Mimi’s or burned or sold, she guesses; the floor is the uninterrupted flat gray of naked cement. 

“I’ll make some coffee,” he says.

These days the room looks half-inhabited and lived-out-of: there’s a duffel bag at the opposite end of the couch with jeans and collared shirts sloughing out of it and three pill canisters in the side pocket, stacked folders and papers on the table, a few faded Post-Its clustered on the far wall. Newspapers and flattened boxes are coming apart in the water-browned corners like a watery, yellowed barricade. Something somewhere is dripping mechanically. The fan roars above her and Mark, the frame buzzing in front of the broad, loud blades. She picks up a canister and sees Mark flinch a little ways away before he walks off, around the couch.

“Adderall?” Mark is behind her, over by the makeshift kitchen. There’s movement, the sound of plastic bags and clacking porcelain. “What are you doing with Adderall?”

“Staying awake. Focusing. Joanne, I didn’t come to your apartment and...pry into your business, let’s remember that.”

“I knew people in college, in law school who --” She rolls the bottle between her hands, talking to the side but not quite over her shoulder. The lid presses lines into her palms. “Mark, I’m not one for getting into other people’s problems, but, I mean this is meth --”

“It’s not _meth_ , it’s --” There’s a click and the coffee maker starts dripping tinnily in front of him. “-- amphetamine, which is _different_ , and I could’ve sworn you weren’t my mother.” His voice is ugly and sour, and it reminds her a little of Roger on bad days. 

She lets that settle, childish and bitter as it is, and says, “You can’t live like this.”

Mark doesn’t move as she rises and walks to him. “Joanne, you really, _really_ don’t know what my life is like --” And he doesn’t move when she comes inexcusably close, even as her hand curves around the thin, sharp knob of his hip. She watches him wet his lips and brace against the counter. “What are you doing?” He faces her, and her hand rolls with him until it is flat against his side. 

“What are you doing?” A shiver there, very faint. She looks up -- there is wild, sore weariness in his face, what might be the remains of a high.

“Relax, Mark,” she says. In the dark, her hand is gray against the pale of his shirt, and she feels him tense, great, anxious cords tightening along the length of his body.

“Come on, what are you doing, Joanne?” The coffee machine sounds out three dull tones beside them, and the breathy gurgle of its percolation dies off. The fan shouts over the room, a loud, forceful hum with the underlying insect rattle of its aluminum screen and stand, and Joanne finds Mark’s other hip. 

She shifts forward, rhythmic and slow, until their chests press together, and Mark looks down at her wonderingly. “Why?” He asks, quiet, pleading. His eyes are frantically, searchingly wide as he looks from her mouth to her hands to her breasts.

“You’re not all bad, Mark.” She kisses him at the corner of his mouth, and when he doesn’t move, she tries it at his jaw, then the jut of his Adam’s apple, but it’s when her hands slide down to the top of his jeans that he puts his palms at the small of her back, then down, quickly, over her ass. Fine little tremors run through him, especially his hands, especially the tips of his fingers, and she feels every nervous vibration when he feels for her hips and the skin of her stomach. Mark smells stale, like sweat and thinning deodorant, and even with the coolness of his hands moving over her, Joanne feels something like fever heat rising off him through his shirt. He’s good for it -- she knows by his hitches of breath and the way his hands stutter to a stop just below her breasts -- so she ducks away and leads him to the back of the couch. Mark leans into her there, opening his mouth to let her deeper in. 

She gets one soft, tense moan out of him before he lifts her up onto the couch’s ridge and parts her legs with his thighs. Joanne pulls off her tank top before he can, and she watches him appreciate her breasts, taking one in his cold, damp hand and feeling her nipple with his fingertip. She would like to see him, too: pale pink nipples and trailing, whitish hairs. _Later_ , she thinks, but there won’t be one, not one for the two of them, and that’s -- well, she likes Mark. She knows this will change and likely break things between them. She knows how to get a point across, though, and Mark could be a weighty argument. He will be.

Joanne feels his cock pressing against the join of her pelvis and thigh; there’s a small, slight thrill in that, in how bluntly wanting it is. He breathes hot against her, at the slope of her neck, even though his mouth makes startled attempts, he never manages to get her name out.

“Alright,” she says absently; it seems like he needs something to be said, some reassurance, some anchor. Joanne unzips him while he fumbles with the waistband of her jeans, and she hears him choke something out, mumbling, so she puts her hands on his cheeks and straightens his head.

Mark clears his throat. “I’m not -- not without a condom,” he manages. It is the last immediate reason not to, and Joanne can see his foresight is faltering. She has one -- in her wallet, actually. She found a handful of them tucked into toes of Maureen's heels. When she presses it into his palm, he goes still for moment. At length, he touches her thigh and feels his way up.

Unbuttoning her fly, his hand slips down and presses against the warm softness between her legs, his fingers starting too high. She stops him when he reaches her clit, and through her panties, he rubs slow circles against her. He does fine, better than she had thought he might. Joanne feels he’s taking his time, though, putting off actually fucking her, so she moves herself around him, guides his hand sometimes, and she comes slowly and -- shallowly. There is a part of her that doesn’t notice the sudden fuzz of orgasm. 

She arches towards him, and slowly he gets his briefs down past the flat of his ass, gets the condom on. She's wet and open when he presses in. Joanne finds pleasure she hadn’t expected in his dragging kisses and the rub of her breasts against his stiff, flat chest and his flat, sqaure-ish hands. His cock is warmer than a strap-on, softer than the one Maureen uses. His hitches and pushes are different -- Mark moves blindly, need-based, frantic in a way, which might be the Adderall, or however many sleepless nights he’s had, or just want. 

Joanne folds her hands behind his neck. His hips come flush with hers smoothly, now, scattered pleasure coming in patches. She wonders how long it’s been since his last, wonders if those few scattered women he found after Maureen are his most recent fucks. All that was -- she shifts to let Mark deeper -- before Mimi came back. A little over a year. 

Mark’s mouth shivers over her pulse, nervous and needy contact. She feels a sympathetic prickle of heat at that, how he must want this, or anything.

Joanne’s knees are up at his sides, and he holds her at an angle on the back of the couch, pushing in with stammering thrusts. She guides them with hands on his hips, smoothes them, and he grips her with two hands on her ass, groping. His muffled noises, his breaths, his gasps are somehow deeper, throatier than she thought they might be. 

His hands skip up and sift into the dense mass of her hair, slipping in at the root and gripping gently, his hips too shaky and fast under her touch, and he comes with a long, trembling roll forward and “God -- shit, shit, shit, _yes_ ,” choked and low.

In the quiet afterglow, Joanne slides her hands under his shirt. He doesn’t have enough in him to speak, so he whines deeply and sounds pained with need. She thinks about what to say next, but he pushes off, zips up, and walks across the room to toss the condom out. Joanne turns to keep him in sight, and she’s struck by how simply, fumblingly attractive he is. Awkwardly, he rubs the smudges off his glasses, the frames stark against the flush of his face. He presses his fingers against the bridge of his nose, every movement a little bit desperate, and looks at her.

“Was it good for you?”

“Yeah.” She leans back, briefly off-balance, and gets her tank top from the cushion behind her. She tries to smile. Mark watches her pull it on. “Was it good for you?”

Mark doesn’t answer at first, but she waits for him. He digs his fingers into his mussed hair and pants, “Yeah, yeah, it was good for me. Why did you --”

He cuts out. Joanne doesn’t want or need to explain, to tell him he already knows. Neither of them wants to hear the stale normalcy of her reasoning; her motivation is selfish and tedious, and they’re aware of it all already. She considers telling him that she wasn’t so conscious as to plan this out, the hand on his side or the sight of her breasts. Walking down the heat-swollen avenue, she hadn’t even been sure she could go through with it. Still, she seems like she knows what she’s doing, and she levels her shoulders and lengthens her back.

The coffee machine lets out a late, bloated huff of steam. Curt, bitter, she says, “We have sex every night and expect it to pave everything over, and that’s not a relationship. That’s short-sighted. I need better, and fuck, I deserve better. I’m not going to settle. I’m not --” She watches her fingers stretch out, curl, drift. “At some point you need to cut your losses. And I’m cutting them, Mark.”

“You should go.” Marks amends, quickly, “Nothing else is going to happen after this. This isn’t how things...start.” He stumbles hard, loudly, and Joanne flinches towards him. Leaning on the coffee table, practically hanging on it, he says in a rush, “I’m so tired, I’m so _tired_.”

Achingly belated, she asks if he should go to hospital. He says, witheringly, “I’m broke, Joanne. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept --”

“God, Mark, I can pay,” she starts, swinging her legs over the couch.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t --” He holds up a hand. “I used to think it was kind of funny, that we might be good for each other if you weren’t -- if you were into that. But I never really thought things would go this way.” Mark sags over the table. “I’ll get myself somewhere, but you should -- you should go.”

She does.

When Joanne comes back to the loft, the rooms are cool and the smells are familiar. She settles herself at her kitchen table under the toneless fluorescent light and waits for Maureen to show. Boozy and loving, Maureen knocks at the door at midnight, not much worse for wear. Joanne wants to be petty and small and cruel as she says she fucked Mark, but she isn’t. She manages to be relatively mature and Maureen, loose from alcohol and happier company, can’t find her own anger. Maureen is only wet-eyed when she leaves again with some close friend waiting on the ground floor. Joanne spends the night with a bottle of cheap cognac, packing her away.

Soon Tom comes back out of the woodwork to stay with Mark for the sake of him getting off the Adderall, at least off most of it, and Mark and Joanne talk. It is two months later, after Maureen has bounced from living arrangement to living arrangement -- Mimi and Roger for a while, a guy named Gordon, and finally some Julliard TA -- when Joanne calls Mark, and, over the phone, they talk.

Joanne is quick to get the brief catching-up out of the way, and she apologizes as best she can -- tripping over herself, trailing off, but sincere.

“It’s fine,” Mark says, and while he’s not quite lying, she hears some sort of retreat in his voice, like he’s giving up the right to be upset, or the ability. It’s not that he has forgiven her, but he might have pushed it to be a non-issue, and whatever feelings he had were so ambiguous, so malformed and intricate that he shoved them off and away. 

Joanne finds herself suddenly unsteadied, her apologies emptied quickly and quietly. “It’s not fine, Mark,” she says. Her voice, when it comes, is lower and steadier than she expected. She’s glad for it.

He says, flat and patient, “Do you want me to be angry? I’m not an angry person. It’s not how I am.”

Joanne presses her fingers against her forehead for moment. In her hand, the phone buzzes: soft, persistent. “People wish you would be, sometimes. It would make things easier.”

“This is easier for me.” She hears shuffling at the other end. “There’s a cab waiting downstairs, and I have to go to...to a meeting kind of thing.” He offers to give Tom her best, and she thanks him, hangs up.

The receiver is dull and cool in her hands, the base heavy and angular in her lap. August has laid its broad, hot hand down on the Northeast with the weight of its palm on New York. Everything is hot orange in the late sun, and the blue and purple shadows make bruises in corners and folds. Joanne is a little stunned by the quiet and the emptiness of her loft, and the blatant space of her mattress. 

She stands on the lumped mass of comforter and sheets at the foot of her bed and pulls the browning cord of the ceiling fan. With an organic hum, the blades revolve. Slabs of warm air spill over her hair, her shoulders, and she relaxes into the soft pile of her bedclothes. 

Pulling the phone onto her stomach, she considers this -- this freedom, this levity of mind. It is what she’d expected, equal parts release and nausea. Tracing the thick buttons that make up Mark’s number -- 212, to start, then the four and seven and zeros -- Joanne considers the apology she had planned to make: “I’m sorry, I’m selfish -- you should learn to be selfish, too.”


End file.
